I’ve just had a project dumped in my lap and I have a few hours to put it together.  Part of the shot is a large landscape of grassy, rolling hills.

I have to start the camera fairly close to the ground and then move up into the sky, tilting down.

In the past I’ve used hair to create grass, but this shot is so wide, I’m running into severe memory problems.  I also tried using instanced grass geometry from the hair, and had the same memory issues.

I’d love any suggestions on tackling this.  I’m going to take a break from the grass and work on the characters for a while.

Thanks,

Paul

did you solve it? we have had to do fields of grasses & flowers before and hit memory issues with large amounts of instance objects. we managed to get a render out by splitting the scene up into fore mid & background passes. and each level used different geometry for the instances - ie further back was more aggressively optimized. I think even the BG layer was pre-rendered grids.  We also used hair for this as we could get some nice ‘swaying’ in the winf type shots with this.

I think its a case of seeing how much is possible, then in each shot splitting the scenes up accordingly. The more you can optimise the instance geometry the better.

I sort-of solved the problem.  First, by chopping up the geometry and second by killing the shadows on the grass.  Shadows were the major problem that kept crashing XSI.